Why HBO's `The Wire' is the best show on TV

June 01, 2003|By Steve Johnson, Tribune television critic.

In an age of instant gratification, "The Wire" is a difficult sell.

This intricate and superb HBO crime story, which begins its second season Sunday (9 p.m.), drops us into the middle of its business, rather than spending the first episode having all the characters explain who they are and how they got to be that way.

It's set in Baltimore, rather than in an official TV locale such as Miami or New York, and it's really set in Baltimore, filming there and making the gritty waterfront city as much a star as any of the no-name actors portraying the city's cops, drug dealers and dockworkers.

It gains dramatic power not so much from the big moment as from the accretion of small ones, the gang leader telling an underling to shut up so he can study for his mid term, the high-level cop offering a peer political support in exchange for an investigation into his union-leader enemy, the prison warden accepting what he knows to be a prisoner-engineered frame-up of a guard because it solves some nasty deaths.

In the vision of creator David Simon ("Homicide: Life on the Street," "The Corner"), "The Wire" aims to provide something more than mere entertainment. Last season, it was a cry against the futility of the drug war; this year it bemoans the decline, even betrayal, of the American working class. Behind both is the idea of the oppressive power of the institution, whether a police department, a drug organization or a labor union.

"If there's a theme that continues, it's that in this modern world, everyday people are worth less," says Simon, a former Baltimore police reporter whose books were the starting point for both "Homicide" and "The Corner." "Every day they're more expendable, whether it's the kid selling drugs at the high-rise, or the cop on the beat, or a longshoreman who's not working anymore.

"It's a very angry show, in a lot of ways very political. But the day that some character gets up and talks on camera like I'm talking now is the day I've written a bad show."

And it won't let you just watch one week and miss the next. Where most series provide, at best, short stories, "The Wire" is a novel, a close and carefully unfolding examination into the souls of the men and women enmeshed in a multi-layered investigation into waterfront crime.

"This sounds a little vain," says Simon, "but we sort of felt [last year] like we needed to train people to watch the show a little bit. The pacing is deliberately different. Until you get into it, you ain't into it."

In other words, you see all 12 episodes, or else.

The "or else," of course, is that you miss the best show on television. That's right. It's better, even, than that other HBO series, the one about the nice New Jersey family, because for all of David Chase's brilliance with character in "The Sopranos," he can sometimes wander down thematic dead ends in search of a great dramatic discovery.

Simon, with his careful plotting, police-investigation structure and sure sense of what he is trying to say, gives "The Wire" a sense of propulsion, of every moment building to something.

Not a simple show

He asks a lot of viewers along the way: not only that they watch it all, but that they pay close attention as they do. But he'll also reward that attention amply. The very investigation that will lead, presumably, to this season's wiretap, or "wire," arises from a great, potentially comic situation that veers toward tragedy.

A dockworkers' union, led by a Polish-American Catholic, contributes to the local church the new stained-glass window it needs, an image of stevedores on the job. The area's police major, also a Polish-American Catholic, has commissioned his own stained glass for the church, depicting cops at work.

When the cop finds the union has beaten him to it, and contributed more money to the parish besides, he starts a feud that quickly escalates in a manner that's at once darkly funny, sad and reeking of truth.

He has his men start ticketing laborers' cars, testing the workers for DUIs at 8 in the morning. The union swipes a surveillance vehicle from the police lot, ships it all around the country and sends the major photos of it from its journey.

Next thing you know, there's a special task force investigating the union, which has a lot to worry about.

The union still wants, mostly, more regular work and has hired a lobbyist to persuade politicians to invest in making the harbor more amenable to big boats. But it's also taken to letting an organized crime outfit unload the occasional freight container off the books, and one container in particular, whose grim contents police discover as the first episode concludes, will have broad ramifications.

Believable characters

Although the big themes are in play, this isn't Clifford Odets making his characters into idea puppets. The people that Simon and his collaborator, former Baltimore cop Ed Burns, have imagined are utterly believable as human beings.